Catastrophism
Plants and animals living in the parts of the world where such events occurred became extinct, to be replaced abruptly by the new forms whose fossils defined the geological strata.
The French scientist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) popularised the concept of catastrophism in the early 19th century; he proposed that new life-forms had moved in from other areas after local floods, and avoided religious or metaphysical speculation in his scientific writings.
[2][3] In the early development of geology, efforts were made in a predominantly Christian western society to reconcile biblical narratives of Creation and the universal flood with new concepts about the processes which had formed the Earth.
While he did speculate that the catastrophe responsible for the most recent extinctions in Eurasia might have been the result of the inundation of low-lying areas by the sea, he did not make any reference to Noah's flood.
In fact Cuvier, influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment and the intellectual climate of the French Revolution, avoided religious or metaphysical speculation in his scientific writings.
[3] Cuvier also believed that the stratigraphic record indicated that there had been several of these revolutions, which he viewed as recurring natural events, amid long intervals of stability during the history of life on Earth.
[5] By contrast in Britain, where natural theology was influential during the early nineteenth century, a group of geologists including William Buckland and Robert Jameson interpreted Cuvier's work differently.
As a result of the influence of Jameson, Buckland, and other advocates of natural theology, the nineteenth century debate over catastrophism took on much stronger religious overtones in Britain than elsewhere in Europe.
In part, the geologists' rejection was fostered by their impression that the catastrophists of the early nineteenth century believed that God was directly involved in determining the history of Earth.
[13] Neocatastrophism is the explanation of sudden extinctions in the palaeontological record by high magnitude, low frequency events (such as asteroid impacts, super-volcanic eruptions, supernova gamma ray bursts, etc.
[14] In 1980, Walter and Luis Alvarez published a paper suggesting that a 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) asteroid struck Earth 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period.
